Dr. Paul Piff from the university of California, Berkley proved what we all suspected.. rich people behave like jackasses.

How imaginary wealth creates jackasses…

In his first study, Dr. Piff had two college students play monopoly against each other. But one student was given substantial advantages…

The ‘richer’ student got three times more money at the beginning of the game. He got $400 instead of $200 when he ‘passed go’ and… he got to roll the dice two times for every roll the ‘poor’ student made.

After only 15 minutes, the ‘rich’ student started displaying dominant behavior.

He would tap his piece harder against the game board, make fun of the ‘poor’ student for having less money and use dominant body language like lifting his arms in the air or snickering.

And to top all that, when asked to explain why they won, the ‘rich’ students talked about the techniques they used and the smart purchase decisions they made. Almost none of them remembered the overwhelming advantages they were given.

In just 15 minutes, the game created a mindset of entitlement in ordinary students.

The unbelievable rich people zebra-crossing experiment

In another experiment, Dr Piff checked if drivers of luxurious cars behaved differently than drivers of low-priced cars by testing if they would stop and let a pedestrian cross at a zebra crossing (In California where the test was conducted, drivers are bound by law to stop and let a pedestrian cross at a zebra crossing).

The results were mind blowing… After 100s of tests, the results showed that the drivers of the lowest price-category cars stopped almost 100% of the time.

While the drivers of the highest price-category cars (Mercedes, Porsche, etc’) stopped only 50% of the time.

This is worth repeating – rich people disobeyed the law (and behaved like raging jackasses) 50% of the time!!!

But what does it have to do with sales objections?

Within the sea of jackassary and evilness, Dr Piff made one promising revelation – that small psychological nudges made a huge difference in the attitude of rich people.

If they were shown a short 15-minute video about child poverty, rich people became just as willing to donate their time and money as poor people.

Rich people are not evil at their core – the set of advantages they have causes them to adopt a mind set of entitlement. But when ‘shaken’ out of their mindset, they become just as helpful and kind as poor people.

The same can be done with your customer’s mindset…

For example …

If you have a training product, a major purchase-objection your customer might have is that he doesn’t have time to learn new things.

In that case, instead of bullying him with advice like:

“Get up an hour earlier!”

Or …

“Work after your wife and the kids have gone to sleep! – I worked from 10:00pm to 1:00am every night and look at how successful I am!”

or my favorites…

“Double down and do the work” and… “You can have anything you want but not everything you want”.

Instead, try to gently shift their mindset by showing them how much fun they can have while learning.

Or … how implementing what they learn will actually free up their time.

Back already? Want to know the answer? Well the answer is … (drum roll please)…

The EGG.

The reason is very simple …

A long time ago creatures that were very similar to chickens but not quite chickens roamed the earth.

They were one tiny mutation away from becoming chickens … but they were not there yet. It doesn’t mean they weren’t happy. It only means they weren’t chicken.

Then one morning, one of these nearly-chickens laid an egg. And this was not an ordinary egg – the DNA of the almost-chicken mutated and that egg carried the first chicken in the universe.

Cool isn’t it?

My son loves reading Wikipedia entries and he stumbled unto that.

But how does that relate to viral content?

Well … we tend to share stuff that we find impressive. The reason we do this is because it gives us ‘social equity’. When we tell a really good story it makes us look smarter and more interesting.

So if you create a piece of content that when shared makes the ‘sharer’ look smarter or cooler or funnier – you’re on your way to creating a viral piece of content.

And what’s really cool about this is that you can easily find interesting stories and facts to incorporate into your content…

Just pay attention to how you react to stories and facts … if you’re thinking – “Wow, that’s pretty cool” or if you experience a strong emotion, then email yourself a note about that particular story or fact.

If you properly tag those emails, pretty soon you’ll have a bunch of stories you can use in your content.

But that is just the beginning.

Another factor that increases the viralness of your content is – useful information.

If you provide useful actionable techniques in your content then you increase the amount of social equity a reader gets when he shares your content.

So a strong recipe to creating viral content is to …

1. Collect stories and facts that impress you or trigger a strong emotional response in you.

2. Use them in your content.

3. Give away useful, actionable techniques in your content.

And that’s it … you now have a recipe for creating your own viral content

P.S.

If you found this a article just a little bit helpful then I have a small favor to ask of you…

Please share it by pressing one of the social media icons at the bottom of this article or by sending it to a friend.

It would mean the world to me!

P.P.S.

The inspiration for this article came from a brilliant book about viral content called “Contagious” by Professor Johah Berger.

Three dirty looking punks with mohawk hair-dos and tattoos that cover their entire bodies stand at the street corner.

A police patrol car stops in front of them. Sitting behind the wheel is a cop with a jackass look and a mustache to match.

“Do you have permits for these?” He asks… pointing at the pistols hanging out of their torn pants.

The dirty blond guy throws his skateboard on the ground and kicks it under the police cruiser so that just the tip of the skateboard is still visible.

“Here’s our permits ” he says … and kick-flips the skateboard…

The skateboard hits the bottom of the police cruiser with so much force it sends it FLYING into the night sky.

The three punks pull out their guns and shoot round after round, until they blow up the car that’s still twirling in the air.

That is the opening scene of the “Kung Fury” movie trailer.

As I write this … the trailer has raised $262,989 on KickStarter.com for the sole purpose of of finishing the movie.

You see… the movie isn’t finished. The producer/director needed money to complete the movie. So he created a movie trailer with the awesomest story he could think of. And asked the world to help him finance the production.

And the world replied enthusiastically and donated more than a quarter of a million to an unknown Swedish movie producer.

And all that money was raised in less than 48 hours.

Just because the story is so AWESOME… more than 6000 people around the world were willing to pay between $5-$10,000 just to see how the story ends.

This is how brilliant advertising works.

Brilliant advertising is an 80s kung-fu action comedy trailer.

It tells a story so powerful, the customer has no choice – he has to buy the product to see how the story ends.

There’s a lot of advice on the internet on making money. But oddly enough, nearly no one talks about the easiest, fastest way to make money – propaganda.

Here’s the game plan:

1. Exploit a certain population to make money – It doesn’t really matter who you exploit as long as you milk them for everything they’re worth.

2. Control the media – Use the money you get from exploiting said population to purchase a lot of advertising.This is a brilliant strategy. It allows you to sell more products with a huge profit (remember, you are either exploiting your workers or your customers or both). Plus, because you are such a big advertiser, you have enormous influence over the newspaper/TV Channel.

Or even better, you can buy the goddamn newspaper. They are dirt cheap these days thanks to the internet.

3. Use your control to block/counter the news of your evil deeds.

You don’t even have to fully block the news. But if one news paper comes out with a story about you, you can use your own channel to:

A) Say that they are full of shit

B) Accuse them of working for your competitors (probably true)

C) Expose someone else so the focus shifts from you

D) Create a diplomatic crisis so the focus shifts from you

E) And so on…

4. Monopolize your market – Combine your superior profit margins and control of the media to drive out all your (honest) competitors from the market and block entry of new competition. Remember, you now have enough cash and power to wage price wars, bribe politicians hire lobbyists, threaten partners that you’ll stop working with them and so on.

5. Totally exploit the market – You already know how to exploit, but now that you are a monopoly, you can exploit EVERYONE.

6. Use your cash to enter and exploit new markets – choose a new market, and apply this plan from the beginning.

$80,000 or a %13,000 return on investment. This is how much money the technique I am about to share with you generated for one of my clients.

I’ve only started working with her a couple of weeks ago. We’ve been friends for a long time, but we just got around to improving her marketing system.

And we’ve quickly discovered that while she was doing an amazing job for her customers (she is literally responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue) – she had no testimonials to speak of.

She didn’t want to ask her clients for testimonials – no one does.

But since the service she is providing is so powerful, we had to back it up with a ton of proof, otherwise no one would believe us.

So after a fierce argument, she agreed that her most important task is to go after these testimonials.

At first, she called one client and got a glowing testimonial.

She called another one and got another brilliant testimonial.

And when she called the third … she got a brilliant testimonial and … (drum roll please)… $80,000 worth of work.

And this is my gift to you on this day…

When you ask your best customers for testimonials they will

1) Be happy to provide one

2) In the process of giving you the testimonial they will remember how wonderful you are and how beneficial you were to their business and…

3) If they have a project you can help with, they’ll ask for your help right away!

I noticed it when I quit smoking (Yes, Yes, I was also a smoker). The first challenge was getting rid of the nicotine addiction. That was hell, but it only took two weeks. A much bigger challenge was getting rid of my smoking habits. Even when I didn’t need a cigarette for the nicotine, I still felt an almost overwhelming urge to light up in the following cases:

1. When I was excited

2. When I was sad

3. When I was stressed out (which happened a lot since I was the CEO of a struggling startup at the time)

4. When I drank coffee

5. After sex

And that’s just a partial list.

A few times, the need to smoke was so strong, I slipped. And bear in mind that at that point I couldn’t even stand the smell or taste of cigarettes.

And still… I smoked. Despite knowing that it would be disgusting . Despite knowing I would need to go through nicotine-withdrawal hell all over again. And despite the fact that my lovely, gentle wife would kill me dead if she found out.

And still, the conditioning was so strong, it took me more than a year to get from under it.

Why this happens

Well… it’s pretty simple. The nicotine in the cigarettes and the sugar in the snacks stimulate our brain’s pleasure center.

So when we repeatedly compensate ourselves with pleasure (chocolate) while feeling an emotion (sad) and every time we reward ourselves (cigarette) after performing a specific action (drink coffee), we are training ourselves to associate that action or feeling with the snack or with the cigarette.

This association is created at the primal level of our brain (our lizard brain). That’s why it’s so hard to fight it. That’s why these urges ‘appear’ out of the blue.

What to do to stop snacking

1. Stop being ashamed – you are not weak. You are just very well trained to snack.

2. Make a list of snacking triggers – Be honest. Make a complete list of all the feelings/situations that send you on a snack hunt.

3. Choose an alternative reward – Find a behavior that gives you pleasure and that’s healthy. It’s also a good idea to chose something you can do anywhere and doesn’t take long to do, Like talking to a friend or listening to a song on your iPod or doing one yoga exercise.

4. Start small – Pick one trigger that causes you to snack from the list above and decide to replace its reward/compensation with the healthy alternative.

5. Repeat for 30-60 days – This is the amount of time it usually takes to re-train your brain.

6. Continue to the next trigger – Once you’ve re-trained yourself for a specific trigger, you can move on to the next one. The second one will be a lot easier, because you’ve already succeeded once.

I’ve used this technique to quit smoking and stop snacking. The only problem was I substituted the smokes and the snacks for reading comics and watching TV. So now I have to quit those.

Well… nobody’s perfect (yet)

I need your help…

I want to compile a comprehensive list of healthy alternative habits. I would love it if you could think of something that you (a) love to do and (b) you can easily do anywhere and (c) don’t require a great deal of preparation.

And then either leave them as a comment on my facebook page or here on the blog.

You stare into the boiling diet desert. As far as the eye can see there is nothing but sand, scorching winds and vultures.

On the other side of this desert, there is a better you. A thinner, lighter version of you. A version of you that can buy and wear anything. A version of you that doesn’t get tired all the time. A happier you.

But you dare not step into the desert. The journey is terrifying. You could not possibly endure the months of suffering (and almost certain death).

And just as you are about to lose hope, your eyes pick up an irregularity in the desert terrain. Specks of gold and brown mark a path across the desert.

You see a view so wonderful, so intoxicating, that you can’t reconcile it with the brutal reality of the desert.

But it is true… a week’s worth of travel from here, in the middle of the desert, there is a haven, filled with chocolate, coffee and powdered sugar. And there’s a second one another week down the road, and a third and a forth and so on, as far as the horizon and beyond.

Those are the ‘weekly indulgence’ havens and they will make your months (or years) of diet possible and even pleasurable.

Here is how you do it

2. Eat one portion of it every week – Each week eat one dish of this food. It could be a piece of cake, a plate of spaghetti or dozen sushi roles.

3. Enjoy it to the Max – Make an effort to make an outing out of it. Go to your favorite coffee shop or restaurant and take the time to really enjoy your indulgence.

4. Share it with NO ONE – You will not share your weekly indulgence with anyone. Not your wife or your husband. Not even your kids. This is what keeps you sane. Never ever share it (I use my fork to hit the hands of those that try to rob me of my weekly piece of chocolate bliss – it’s mine and no one will take it from me!).

5. Don’t skip meals – Not before and not after your weekly indulgence. If you stick to your diet during the week and exercise moderately, this one dish will not prevent you from losing weight. On the other hand… being hungry will.

The (BIG) benefits of the weekly indulgence

1. It keeps you sane – There’s a reason we need to diet – we love to eat yummy fattening foods. Totally denying yourself of your favorite foods will cause you to lose your freaking mind. But when you know you have the weekly indulgence you can stay reasonably sane.

2. It prevents you from snacking throughout the week – You do deserve a sugary pick me up once in a while, but when you know you will indulge royally in the near future, you can avoid snacking here and there (the #1 reason for not losing weight).

To conclude… this is my favorite diet habit, and I imagine you’ll like it too.